TL;DR: You should give ruby another chance, but just for fun scripting and possibly a very simple personal website. (Rails is very good for quickly building prototype websites). But yeah go for Unity, more fun. If you know Java you can learn C# (Unity) or C++ (Unreal) they are very similar.
I was given a ror program at my current job to get up and running having no prior experience or even knowing what a gemfile was recently. After updating all the out of date gemfiles the program broke and I had to really start digging in to fix it and after some time I've decided I don't care for Ruby. I've made a basic polygon style shooter in unity and I might go back and look at that again. Ideally I want something where I'm writing/debugging code and not dealing with web if that akes sense. I would love to do that with java or now that you have me thinking back to unity that as well.
Thats a horrible way to be introduced to Ruby. I'd checkout tutorials on pure ruby. Rails is a decent framework, but too many people learn the basics of Rails, and never actually learn Ruby. And Rails before version 3.2 is a fucking clusterfuck.
Ruby will drive Java developers nuts, since it took its OOP from SmallTalk and Perl. However, one nice bit is unlike Java/C++ there are no primitives, even raw numbers are objects (of Class Fixnum).
• Every method (except a few like puts ) returns something, in fact a method or a block automatically returns the last value in its block.
• It supports closures (called blocks) which are amazing, (Javascript also uses closures, it calls them anonymous functions).
• Its Array/Enumerator objects have amazing list processing built-in.
• Very strong reflection, you can ask objects pretty much anything including where a method is defined, in my experience Ruby has some of the strongest built-in debugging tools.
• Singleton classes. This is similar to static methods in other languages, but different. Ruby uses something akin to Prototype in javascript, they call it a singleton class, so the class definition itself is an object.
• Metaprogramming, like Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk, you can dynamically define methods, this is how ActiveRecord just defines all your table getters/setters and what-not. Its why Rails has the best ORM.
On the other hand:
The Rails community in particular are a bunch of religious zealot fucks, its hard to get jobs because they firmly believe that what you code affects your brain, so if you coded in C or Perl or any other "impure" language, or don't drink the Test first for everything kool-aid you're fucked. (And even if you do... you get a 30% chance considering you must make the "right" choice between javascript frameworks.)
They're also mostly in their 20s.
But here's some cool code:
https://gist.github.com/bloodycelt/8f0537bb69657d69352c in ruby.
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